Dropbox

Shared goals, collaboration, and personal connection are key factors behind becoming a team that functions like a well-oiled machine – and has fun, too!

Industry

Enterprise Software

Location

San Francisco, CA

Company size

1,500-2,000

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“Jira is the tool that enables all the people, roles, and data that contribute to a great software product. It provides everyone with a single source of truth.”

Daniel

Engineer, Dropbox

Dropbox: making work better for people

Dropbox is a leading global collaboration platform that's transforming the way people and teams work together. With more than 500 million registered users across 180 countries, they're on a mission to unleash the world's creative energy by designing a more enlightened way of working. Laura, Alex, Parker, and Daniel are on the New Projects Team, which works on new desktop experiences for Dropbox. We asked about their tactics for building a high-functioning team, and they named shared goals, collaboration, and personal connection as factors behind becoming a team that functions like a well-oiled machine – and has fun, too!

The New Projects Team began working together two and a half years ago. Laura, Alex, Parker, and Daniel represent a quarter of their team, which includes eight engineers, two product managers, two product analysts, and three designers who are spread between San Francisco, Seattle, and Australia. The team has become a collection point for staff within the larger organization who want to develop ideas that are in their early stages, and they've built their team around that incubator identity. "It's nice to work on a team where we have early product DNA," says Daniel, one of the team's engineers. They also have a shared customer-first mindset, which ties to Dropbox's core value to "aim higher." They're constantly responding to user feedback and adjusting their plan based on what they hear.

Working together efficiently and transparently with Jira

Although the team is scattered across the globe, specific tools and processes are in place to ensure they work together efficiently and transparently. "Jira is a core part of our release process," notes Daniel. The New Projects Team divides their six-week sprints into three two-week dashes and use Jira for sprint planning, backlog triage, feature requests, and epics for multi dash complex feature areas. Like most product teams, they're fast-moving, and Jira helps the group focus on creating the best product possible for their customers while tracking the team's velocity. Alex, one of the team's analysts, and Parker, a product manager, do a weekly bug bash where they use Dropbox’s save screenshot feature to add images of product bugs to Jira. This process let’s them determine which new releases will go out to a cohort of users, and which bugs are blocking them.

Jira also saves time, so the team can dedicate more hours to their work. They do a daily scrum with Jira that takes just 10 minutes; Daniel recalls his pre-Jira scrums taking up to an hour. "[Jira] is the tool that enables all of the people, roles, and data that contribute to a good software product. It provides a single source of truth," he says.

Meet the team (from left to right) Daniel, Laura, Parker

Jira allows the New Projects Team to see the big picture while staying focused on their individual tasks

As the central tool behind product, design, and engineering, Jira allows the New Projects Team to see how they're contributing to the bigger picture while staying focused on their work. "Jira is how I get Daniel to do stuff," Laura says jokingly. She'll design an asset, then create a task in Jira with her designs and a description so her work can be coded on the backend. "It's nice to see how my work fits into the bigger project picture within Jira," she continues. The team recently experienced a big win when they repackaged their product based on customer feedback and research. Alex ran the product tests, and the results were so successful, they had trouble believing it.

Shared goals, collaboration, and people make a team

But shared goals and tools don’t complete a team. When we asked Laura, Alex, Parker, and Daniel what makes them excited to come to work every day, they all agreed it was the people. "We have great teammates, and that makes it easier to come to work every day," says Parker.